The Thailand Nursing and Midwifery Council aims to help relieve nurses' gruelling routines that bind them to 40-hour-plus workweeks, straining their health as their benefits wane.
Nurses are reportedly being "forced" to maintain their heavy workloads with scant chance of rest due to a lack of medical staff, council representative Kritsada Sawaengdi said ahead of a meeting on the matter with the Public Health Ministry.
"We're waiting to be called for talks with the permanent secretary for public health," she said yesterday.
The council wants to see a new regulation introduced to codify less burdensome working hours. Sukhum Kanchanaphimai, the permanent secretary, has assigned a working group to look into the matter and set suitable workloads for public health officials.
Nurses are currently required to put in overtime after their regular shift ends, either on a voluntary or non-voluntary basis.
However as most of this is not voluntary, and nurses can often end up doing 16-hour days, establishing a "special wage" for them is not the ideal solution, Ms Kritsada said.
Unless the situation is resolved, patients are also likely to suffer from sub-standard services.
"Nobody wants an accident to happen, but some already have happened [as a result of tired and overworked staff]," Ms Kritsada said, adding she plans to propose three measures.
First, medical staff must be distributed better among hospitals to better match the number of patients.
The imbalance is considered particularly lopsided in the case of rural hospitals, she said.
Second, work safety protocols must be improved. Third, public health officials' welfare entitlements need to be ramped up to boost morale, she said.
"We need a cluster of solutions" or more medical staff will leave the profession, said Praphatson Phongphanphisan, assistant secretary-general at the council.
Hospital executives plan to discuss nurses' heavy workloads tomorrow, said Samusakhon Hospital director Moli Wanitsuwan, chairman of the regional and general hospital association.
